World Restructuring

[ziad.4270]

I am not sure if this has been asked;Is there a possibility of there being a beta test week?

[Grim West.3194]

@TheGrimm.5624 said:

@Grim West.3194 said:

@SugarCayne.3098 said:

@Grim West.3194 said:BG stacked their server with the most players AND the most dedicated WvW players. They didn't care about the health of the game or competition. And they pulled every trick to trick the system to allow even more people in even though they already had by far the most players.

When you game the system, the system dies. So now we are getting a new system. One that is designed to not have a repeat of BandwagonGate.

I’m curious how you see this not repeating itself. The most dedicated will become one alliance and dominate. Could just be called BG 2.0.

Alliance sizes are too small for that to happen. And easily adjustable.

Not sure it can't be gamed from what's been said since I could see conflicting business rules.

People are assigned based on the guild they mark as their WvW guild. WvW guild joins alliance with only 20 members of its 200 flagging this as their WvW guild. If the impact on the alliance is only credited as 20 members and then reaches max size for an alliance and then the other 180 mark the guild as their WvW guild alliance is now over sized next week. Or space is accounted from all 200 even though only 20 have marked it as such and then alliance can never reach full size unless those members later appear. There are still map caps but it still means one pool is larger than the others unless the game is going to block guilds from playing with their member since alliance reached full.

Players will try to get the most out of the Alliance system, that's expected. But the idea is to make Alliance sizes too small for one to dominate all others.

Ideally, we will have a number of hard core Alliances (4,5, 10? that's hard to predict) spread out across different servers, with smaller, less hard core alliances and pugs joining them to create "servers" of somewhat equal numbers (players and playtime) across all time zones for the duration of the match. Much better than the hugely unbalanced servers we have now.

If ANET does this right then it will be much easier to make adjustments to the system as it goes along to keep things competitive.

[Dashingsteel.3410]

I really don't care for this change. It seems to me that you either join a wvw guild or you're irrelevant with this system.

[zealex.9410]

Have u guys thought maybe of adding leaderboards for aliances and guilds now based on their performance during the seasons? Reward for topping them could be something like having flags all over a city of their choice with the aliance logo on it.

[zealex.9410]

@Taboo.3625 said:With server pride being removed , will there be a reason to win ?

Ded for a long time now, aliance pride the new hotness.

[Kilikina.1097]

As a few others have mentioned a good portion of the player base plays with multiple wvw guilds. I have an organized semi serious raid guild, a not serious but organized guild, and a derpy roamer guild. Plus the collection of friends from other guilds I would've joined but for the cap and random friends who rep their own guilds (think, Home BL Defense Roamer). I've been playing with these people for years. A decent part of the reason I've played this game through some of the rough patches has been because of the server community. I understand the need to rebalance, but there should be a way to do that without harming the amazing communities you've fostered over the years.

[BlaqueFyre.5678]

@Kilikina.1097 said:As a few others have mentioned a good portion of the player base plays with multiple wvw guilds. I have an organized semi serious raid guild, a not serious but organized guild, and a kitten roamer guild. Plus the collection of friends from other guilds I would've joined but for the cap and random friends who rep their own guilds (think, Home BL Defense Roamer). I've been playing with these people for years. A decent part of the reason I've played this game through some of the rough patches has been because of the server community. I understand the need to rebalance, but there should be a way to do that without harming the amazing communities you've fostered over the years.

It’s called have those guilds/players join an Alliance/Guild in an alliance to stick together...

[HazyDaisy.4107]

@Sojourner.4621 said:I think the best suggestion regarding that so far has actually be 12 weeks instead of 8 for reshuffles... make a wvw season last an entire 3 months instead of just two.

They did that with the first linking session two years ago. Ask anyone who lived through it, it was a long miserable no end in sight period of time, which is why there was a poll. 2 months is long enough in some cases and too long in others depending on your matchup.

[Heibi.4251]

Quick question that may have been covered:The OP says that a player can select his/her guild as their WvW once their guild says they are a WvW guild. How does this affect the guild? Obviously it means they go to WvW. But what about the PVE environment that many WvW players also do? Is the guild only WvW now?

[Strider Pj.2193]

@Heibi.4251 said:Quick question that may have been covered:The OP says that a player can select his/her guild as their WvW once their guild says they are a WvW guild. How does this affect the guild? Obviously it means they go to WvW. But what about the PVE environment that many WvW players also do? Is the guild only WvW now?

No. They aren't only wvw based on that click. NOW, the Guild Leader may decide to kick people that don't frequent WvW, but that was something currently possible, so, likely most people wont experience this.

[BlaqueFyre.5678]

@Heibi.4251 said:Quick question that may have been covered:The OP says that a player can select his/her guild as their WvW once their guild says they are a WvW guild. How does this affect the guild? Obviously it means they go to WvW. But what about the PVE environment that many WvW players also do? Is the guild only WvW now?

It changes nothing, all it does is allow players to select that guild as their primary WvW Guild so when the Worlds reshuffle they stay together. It changes nothing else.

[Kilikina.1097]

@BlaqueFyre.5678 said:

@Kilikina.1097 said:As a few others have mentioned a good portion of the player base plays with multiple wvw guilds. I have an organized semi serious raid guild, a not serious but organized guild, and a kitten roamer guild. Plus the collection of friends from other guilds I would've joined but for the cap and random friends who rep their own guilds (think, Home BL Defense Roamer). I've been playing with these people for years. A decent part of the reason I've played this game through some of the rough patches has been because of the server community. I understand the need to rebalance, but there should be a way to do that without harming the amazing communities you've fostered over the years.

It’s called have those guilds/players join an Alliance/Guild in an alliance to stick together...

Except that's highly unlikely to work. How many serious guilds will want derby roamed and BL monitors in their alliances? Alliances will mostly be used by fight guilds stacking together or PPT guilds stacking together.

[Yukio blaster.9082]

What do you think about making mercenary guilds :-They should be in a random world but they are hunted by everyone every world can kill them and they can kill everyone.they should be a specified number so they don't mist up the match ups, but still they should make a change if needed and they can act on there own, for example help the last world to get back on the track, or they can be payed to help any world for a period of time 1 day for example so they can't be killed by that world until and after that time ends, and they ill became killable by everyone again .The money transfer from the world to the mercenary guild should be by the system and specified by the system (time and work to do ), if the demanded work isn't don the world can ask for the money back fully or partially, the system should detect how much of the work been don and act based on that .something like the participation in the meta's.every world should have a specified currency that he can get from kills and by that he can assign mercenary's to help (the alliance leader should have the ability to ask for mercenary's help )the work contract should be like-kill people from the other servers for a day(can be accepted by every mercenary individual)-kill 200 player from x server in less than 5 hours . (can be accepted by every mercenary individual)-help the x server to get SM castle .(only guild leader can accept those assignments)if the work isn't don correctly the currency should be back to the allianceevery assignment should be specified if it's payed after fully finishing the job or for every part of the job don .pros:this is a great guild for roamers they can kill and fight everyone .this is a lot of fun:" RUN mercenary's are coming"this is great for rangers thiefs mesmers and every roaming class .this is good for everyone who tried to get to a big guild and failed for many reasons (the class played less required wvw experience ,not the meta armor used.,and more) and they didn't accept him he can be solo mercenary .

[StormPE.8201]

To follow up with @Richard.8207 's responses to my questions about solo WvW:

@Richard.8207 said:Guilds have expectations I can fail to meet. The world has no expectations of me. Guilds are social by design, and I’m an introvert.I would have to spend time and energy finding that group. They’d probably be social. I already have a server. In fact I have more than one since I have multiple accounts.You basically play solo because you don't want to deal with social interaction of guilds or squads, but want the WvW experience everyone else enjoys. I can understand that completely. I also understand not wanting the burden of having to meet guild requirements to be maintained on the roster. If my understanding of the proposed system is correct, you will continue having a server, it will just change every 8 weeks like a linked server does now. You would get reassigned to a new match up with potentially new and different players, guilds, and alliances on your team. I believe this system prioritizes friends' servers/shards over others, so if you have people you enjoy playing with in WvW (even if you aren't social with them), adding them to your friends list should help you stay with at least some of them as match ups change. Is the problem of having some friends unavailable to play with for potentially 8 weeks at a time the main issue at hand here?

@Richard.8207 said:

• What kinds of accolades bring you to WvW in the first place as a solo player?I can do the same things as you can, so this is just an insulting question. I’ll ignore it so I don’t get more annoyed.I'm very sorry that this question came across as insulting, it was definitely not my intention. I was merely hoping to understand what parts of WvW you found rewarding or particularly engaging as a solo player. I've edited my original post to reflect that intention better, so that hopefully others aren't offended by the wording.

@Richard.8207 said:That guild wouldn’t provide as many tags at predictable times as an entire server does.I personally believe that if these changes were to be implemented, it would likely result in more tags available during more hours of the day. It may take some time to adjust to the schedules of unfamiliar tags as shards get readjusted every 8 weeks, however. I can see this as an inconvenience if you've grown accustomed to specific tags being available during specific times. If you have commanders that you're fond of running with, perhaps reach out to them about their plans for these proposed changes or add them as a friend to improve your chances of being matched with them. I realize that's a bit counterintuitive if you're hoping to avoid social interaction, but I thought it might be worth mentioning.

@Richard.8207 said:There is no solution trying to maintain community while also forcing everyone to have more diverse WvW experiences. You’d have to have two options, so basically a server queue and a “balance the fights” queue. The balance queue would obviously have diverse experiences, while the servers would just be more balanced versions of what exists today. This works in other games, but is apparently undesirable to the developers. (It was surely considered as it is the most common solution to this type of problem)I obviously can't speak for what the developers have or have not considered, but I agree that there are various groups of players that won't be well served by these changes. I'm hoping that as communication continues, those groups will find a voice and explain their specific problems with the system and that the developers are able to find a way to help ease the transition for players like you in this area.

In reference to answers regarding guild elitism:

@Richard.8207 said:The only impact of this elitism is the impact on how friendly the environment is to randoms. A large casual alliance will not have even close to the same coverage of tags to join as the entire server has, especially as the most knowledgeable and dedicated players have the most reason to ensure they join an appropriate group.It's very true that some very competitive guilds and alliances will seek to make the most competitive rosters they can. Naturally those rosters will end up exclusive and many players will be left out of their alliances. From what I can tell from the way server match ups will be created, however, you should have much of the same mix of players on each shard as you have now with the worlds in place. You'll have your large and small elite guilds/alliances as well as your large and small casual guilds and alliances along with numerous solo players filling in the gaps. It sounds as if the goal is to create round the clock active players for each shard and relatively balanced match ups for even and engaging skirmishes throughout the season. While I don't believe your concerns in this area are unfounded, I think it's too early to jump to this conclusion as none of us know what the make up of each shard will be, or what kind of commander presence will be available for guildless players to rally behind.

In regards to your other issue with having multiple groups you run with:

@Richard.8207 said:No single guild fixes wanting to play with different groups at different times. If someone plays with 3 different groups of 4 people, but each of those people play with 3 groups of 4, it chains into far too large a group (12 at first stage, 96 at 2nd stage, 768 at 3rd stage, etc). And a lot of people play with more than 3 groups or groups larger than 4 people. Someone will prioritize one of their other groups, and rightly so as people have different priorities. The end result will likely mean casuals that enjoy hanging out with hardcore players on their “off day” won’t get to do so any more.I'm very unsure if there is a good solution to that if you're unwilling to join a guild, or if those groups are unwilling to become an alliance. I agree that it leaves you in a bad position, and has the potential to negatively effect your WvW experience. The best suggestion I could make in this instance would be to friend those players in an effort for their shards to be prioritized for you when match ups are shuffled every season. Obviously this suggestion doesn't fix your issue, and hopefully others can find a better solution for this.

Thank you Richard for taking the time to help explain your viewpoint, hopefully I'm understanding your side of things better now than I was before (I certainly feel like I do). Hopefully your explanations will help others understand what this change could mean for solo players as well, and perhaps improve the end result for your WvW experience.

[Ya Ya Yeah.7381]

@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:

Not sure what you mean here. The idea will be to balance worlds based on adjusted play hours of players. Alliances/guilds are groups of players that the system assigns to a world together. The system when creating worlds will fit the pieces (Alliances, Guilds, and Individual Players) together so the end total adjusted hours per world are even. This means there will be a mix of Alliances, Guilds and Individuals on all worlds. At this time there is not plan to track PPT, K/D, rank, etc into this calculation (though we are open to discussing the pros and cons for using any of those). We are trying to make a number of evenly matched worlds for the season and not three tier-1-worlds three tier-2-worlds etc.

If you aren't going to use PPT, K/D , rank etc for a metric in the matchmaking, then will you give us a leader board for us to track this info on our own? I get what you are trying to do which is to balance the matches, but the biggest flaw in this theory is that there is always going to be players/guilds that are more knowledgeable and arguably better. I could easily foresee that there will be one or two dominant alliances and I am not against that. The players and guilds that have the knowledge that know all the different classes and what they can do, that understand the positioning, that know the maps like the back of their hand, that have no problem watching 20 players and the boons they carry during a battle and avoid the red/yellow circles, etc... are going to be better than those that don't. All I'm saying is give the guilds and players a reason to compete once everyone figures out that this is just going to end up the same situation which is the better, more organized and knowledgeable players/guilds Alliances will win. Give us leader boards as a measure for improvement. Give the winners rewards as a reason to keep winning after dominance has been established and give the players/guilds that didn't win, a goal to get better and win to get those rewards. Ideas for rewards : Alliances or guilds that win X amount of times get the option to expand guild hall to include a large arena to GvG in. Solo players or roamers that don't belong to large guilds give them a chance based on KDR to get unique weapon skins or armor skins..etc. Just please consider this seriously or I will bet that this will end up the exact as was before except players and guilds won't have balanced matches to blame it on.Give everyone a reason to compete is all I am saying or include a metric that will do a better job of balancing based off skill or experience. :)

[BlaqueFyre.5678]

@Kilikina.1097 said:

@BlaqueFyre.5678 said:

@Kilikina.1097 said:As a few others have mentioned a good portion of the player base plays with multiple wvw guilds. I have an organized semi serious raid guild, a not serious but organized guild, and a kitten roamer guild. Plus the collection of friends from other guilds I would've joined but for the cap and random friends who rep their own guilds (think, Home BL Defense Roamer). I've been playing with these people for years. A decent part of the reason I've played this game through some of the rough patches has been because of the server community. I understand the need to rebalance, but there should be a way to do that without harming the amazing communities you've fostered over the years.

It’s called have those guilds/players join an Alliance/Guild in an alliance to stick together...

Except that's highly unlikely to work. How many serious guilds will want derby roamed and BL monitors in their alliances? Alliances will mostly be used by fight guilds stacking together or PPT guilds stacking together.

Well if they don’t actually want to stay together and actively try to then what’s the issue? Oh right there isn’t one because the Alliance system addresses those issues, those players that want to stick together can form their own alliance, they don’t have to be beholden to another person to make the alliance and accept them in.wow what a Concept.

[Jen.6021]

@"Raymond Lukes.6305" said:There has been a lot of discussion about the player “evaluation.” We already use play hours to determine population status of a world. With this system, moving people around ever two months we would like to track a few more things that can help us distribute players more effectively. One thing we are looking at tracking is commanding. Commanders are a big part of WvW no matter if your prefer scouting, roaming, running with a havoc squad or the zerg. Commanders are not the only piece to the WvW puzzle but they are a big piece. We would use commander time and squad sizes to determine a scaler to that commander players play time. For example, these are not the real values but I am not even a full cup of coffee in so for my sake I am going to make the math easy, PlayerA, PlayerB and PlayerC all play for roughly 100 hours a week. PlayerA commands smaller havoc squads, PlayerB is a PUG zerg commander, and PlayerC does not command. For all the time a commander is commanding squads let us say of more than two and less than size ten we’ll count those hours at a one and a half times multiplier and higher than ten we’ll count it at two times. If Player A were always commanding, in the small squad range, while playing their time, adjusted hours would be 150 hours. If PlayerB were always commanding, in the large squad range, while playing, their adjusted hours would be 200. Since Player C did not command their hours, remain the same at 100. Doing this can help us get more even matches. WvW is not completely a number of bodies game. A hundred veteran players will always beat a hundred casual players.

Can you get these stats retroactively right? or the first "seasons" will be the test?

[McKenna Berdrow.2759]

@Ovalkvadratcylinder.9365 said:How would this affected an account with characters in different guilds?Would you be able to join one matchup for one character/guild, and another amtch up if you logged in on another character in a different guild?

Guilds are account wide, so you cannot set a different WvW guild per character. The WvW guild is selected for the account.

[clone wars.9568]

As its been mentioned that each world will not all have the same amount of people put on them, and instead it will be based on player hours. What safe guards will be put into place to stop people exploiting this system.

For example to get more ppl on a allies new world all they have to do is reduce their play time for one season? By the next season and new world being set will allow more on this new world because "history" has shown they only played 10hours last season so you expect them to only play 10hr this season?

And yes servers have already gone this far to try to exploit the match up system. One server (i wont name but you know who they are) exploited the current system. They wanted to get their full server to open up so they stopped playing wvw for a bit so that they would tank and drop tiers. Even after anet said on the forums this tactic would fail and they wouldnt be opening up that server after a few months thats what happened the server opened up for new people.

So we have already seen people will go that far to try to get more people on their servers and will likely attempt the same with the new system in April.

You could say well maps will still have the same equal map queue limits and so it will still be balanced even if one world end up with more people playing on it. However that still will give them the advantage. If one side has more people and they end up playing longer than you expected them to, then in turn they're likely to have more people active on the maps. Which of course means they will end up with higher population and the advantage over the other worlds.

Please do not base worlds size on players game time played or it will get exploited.

[DaVid Darksoul.4985]

So much to read thru, so am not aware if this was asked yet. When alliances are formed and world assigned does the player cap consider the entirety of the guilds membership or only those whom selected the guild as WvW? If entire membership is considered then those alliances which have a high number of cross guild members and dormant or straight out PvErs will be outmanned by maps filled will alliances whom have a low non WvW membership and high 1 guild WvW members.

[Raymond Lukes.6305]

Posted an FAQ thread to address some of the common threads we were seeing in here: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/26877/world-restructuring-faqNow back to reading all of your posts...

[sephiroth.4217]

I hope WvW will still have low tiers for players like myself who enjoy smaller scale fights that don't have lag.

I've purposely stayed away from high tiers because running into fight and only having 1 skill work is not fun to me, I hate that sort of lag. "O hai I died because spamming my heals, condition cleanses and various other things still didn't activate the skill once"

[Stand The Wall.6987]

@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:The world’s population will increase based on the adjusted play hours of each of those players. This is the same idea for alliances. Alliances at the base level are just treating a group of guilds as if they were one large guild and assigning those players to the same world.

so if we play more/less, will we get sorted into higher/lower population alliances each reset? cuz that would be not so much fun for plenty of roamers / havoc people out there.

also, if our guild plays a lot but some people in it don't, would that prevent a guild from rising or falling in population? maybe said guild has a ton of pve people which people could game the system with.

will you actively kick afkers? cuz if you don't then this entire revamp will get messy quick. I'm talking about people with macros / or who come back to the game before the auto kick takes effect (think alt tab).

[Saniyah.1984]

@McKenna Berdrow.2759 said:

@"SailorSpira.9371" said:2) Titles based on old servers, will this be a generic "server" veteran, or could we please have something unique and relevant to each server like "Mag Swag" or "BeastGate" something that actually represents the community. One of my guildies also suggested that those with frequent transfers should be "World Traveler".

This is also still being determined. We will keep those suggestions in mind though :)

Uhm I would hate it if the titles were like SUPER nice, but totally exclusive like "oh hey you never played WvW on this server, too bad" please make it so we can obtain any of the titles. It does not have to be free or easy, but

[Baldrick.8967]

@"Mechanix.9315" said:

@"Raymond Lukes.6305" said:There has been a lot of discussion about the player “evaluation.” We already use play hours to determine population status of a world. With this system, moving people around ever two months we would like to track a few more things that can help us distribute players more effectively. One thing we are looking at tracking is commanding. Commanders are a big part of WvW no matter if your prefer scouting, roaming, running with a havoc squad or the zerg. Commanders are not the only piece to the WvW puzzle but they are a big piece. We would use commander time and squad sizes to determine a scaler to that commander players play time. For example, these are not the real values but I am not even a full cup of coffee in so for my sake I am going to make the math easy, PlayerA, PlayerB and PlayerC all play for roughly 100 hours a week. PlayerA commands smaller havoc squads, PlayerB is a PUG zerg commander, and PlayerC does not command. For all the time a commander is commanding squads let us say of more than two and less than size ten we’ll count those hours at a one and a half times multiplier and higher than ten we’ll count it at two times. If Player A were always commanding, in the small squad range, while playing their time, adjusted hours would be 150 hours. If PlayerB were always commanding, in the large squad range, while playing, their adjusted hours would be 200. Since Player C did not command their hours, remain the same at 100. Doing this can help us get more even matches. WvW is not completely a number of bodies game. A hundred veteran players will always beat a hundred casual players.

Can you get these stats retroactively right? or the first "seasons" will be the test?

So, running tagless = solution, game the system. With guilds being the basis of alliances, there will be less need to tag up anyway. Now guilds will run tagless to avoid the hours counting double, meaning the rest of the population will have even less commanders to follow and even less reason to log into wvw?

Titles need to be obtainable by everyone. Don't make the same mistake as the original titles where people gamed the system to obtain 'ultimate dominator', etc as well as enormous numbers of wvw ranks (which they now benefit from with pips).